It was a story of urban-myth proportions, only it happened near a picturesque town in the southwest corner of Colorado near the New Mexico border.

A young couple hitchhikes through Pagosa Springs, gets picked up by four men who shoot the man and gang rape and strangle the woman.

The story would have as many twists and turns as the San Juan River near which the remains of the two young people were found 32 years ago. Since 1982, there has been a decades-long effort to identify the two young homicide victims.

San Juan River near Caracas, a ghost town, where the bodies of a man and woman were discoveredPhoto courtesy Archuleta County Sheriff’s Department

The case would still only be recounted by elderly folks in and near Pagosa Springs if a retired federal agent George Barter hadn’t moved to town five years ago and heard the tale himself.

Most of the following story is recounted based on details from Barter, who was later hired by the Archuleta County Sheriff’s Department as an investigator and currently serves as a reserve cold case investigator.

Because of Barter’s investigation, the story of the murdered couple is no longer a myth. It’s the basis for an ongoing double-homicide investigation, one that has already led to the identification of one of the young victims.

Earlier this year victim’s parents, who had been grieving for more than three decades for a son who went AWOL from the U.S. Navy, now knows that child’s fate and has brought his remains back to their home in Georgia.

The murder mystery began on Sept. 19, 1982.

On that day a rancher named Frank Chaves was riding his horse when he saw what looked at first like a football in the water.

As he got closer it became clear that what he was looking at was really a foot that was bobbing in water near a sand bar on the south shore of the San Juan River.

The foot was attached to a decaying leg and body. Much of the rest of the body was a skeleton. It was the remains of a woman who had died about a month earlier.

A scrap of paper in her pants pocket had the name of a New Mexico woman with her phone number.

On Oct. 22, 1982, another rancher found the skeletal remains of a man. His bones had been scattered nearby on the north bank of San Juan. The bones had been gnawed on by coyotes.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.